Product Hunt Launch Learnings: 700+ upvotes, #2 prod of the day, 110x traffic & 20x signups increase, 1000+ email subscribers

Here's our story. As a manager success platform, 1-on-1 meetings are the critical element of our culture and product at Peoplebox. So we created the most comprehensive list of 1-on-1 questions for managers to help us be better at it. We loved it so thought, why not share it with the world.

We made the microsite, added a social flavor and shared with friends, then on some forums and finally on ProductHunt. - https://www.producthunt.com/posts/1-on-1-meeting-questions-for-managers

We ended up as #2 product whole day, got 700+ upvotes, 75 comments, 40 5* star reviews and then shared by someone on Reddit whose post got 5k upvotes. This resulted in 110x increase in traffic, 20x in signups and over 1,000 emails.

Here is the interesting bit - This wasn't even our main product. It was something we created internally for ourselves, got amazing value and decided to make it public.

Here's what we did to make it happen and learned out of it

Pre-Launch

A couple of weeks ago, we had launched it on Hacker News, and it turned out to be a dudd. So this time, we really prepared for it. Here are the 5 most important things we did, which turned out to be the most effective

1. Create a comprehensive list of all the friends and well-wishers we can ask on the day of launch. This tool the most amount of time.
2. Create a nice video and gif of the product
3. Prepare some anticipated questions that we could see from other forums and answers of it
4. A very simple non-marketing title (Trust me we spent a lot of time on it and finally ended up with 1-on-1 Meeting Questions for Managers
5. A smart message to request for feedback to share with friends, Whatsapp groups and forums after the launch

Hunter

Should we use a hunter or not. We discussed this a lot internally and decided to launch it through an experienced Hunter. Unfortunately, it looked like no one wanted to launch our product. We asked many of our friends and contacts to hunt and they very politely refused saying it will be a failure since its not really a product and just a simple list. Someone advised that hunters don't really matter today as much. It gave us the confidence to launch it ourselves. ( we didn't have any option anyways ;))

Launch Day

The first hour was extremely important. Since we didn't have any great hunter, we needed to get enough upvotes in the first hour to be featured but not enough to be removed by PH. So we simply asked selected people to just provide feedback with comments and upvotes. So within the first 20 mins, we were featured on the first page (at 7th position). We ensured we had a constant supply of feedback from our network. At this time, the community started liking it as well.

By the end of first hour, we were at around 35 upvotes and we were at 3rd position. Now, we accelerated our requests to all our friends and networks through WhatsApp, emails, fb and any other communication model. We started posting on social media and sending emails to our existing customers.

By the third hour, we were at #2 position and 100 upvotes. We continue to post every milestone on social media (100,200,300,400...). By now, almost everything was happening organically including a lucky Reddit break.

The lucky Reddit post

This was an unexpected lucky break we got. Someone who liked us on PH, posted our link on Reddit which just went crazy viral and in a matter of 12 hours, we got over 4,700 upvotes before it was taken down( because it had the PH link)
https://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/fdsri5/ysk_what_to_ask_your_employees_on_your_next_1on1/

After Launch

It was overwhelming for us. I put a small post with some numbers on my LinkedIn and thanked my friends and team. They really deserved it. Not to mention, this post gave us more love in the form of upvotes and comments.

Key Learning

1. Hunters don't matter (really)
2. Prepare, prepare, prepare. Every small detail. It can make or break your launch
3. First Hour is most crucial.
4. The response can be really overwhelming. So make sure you get the best out of it. Test it again and again that your landing page is correct and everything is working perfectly.
5. Luck plays a lot of factors. We grew from No 4 to No 2 because the two above us were removed from featured. It seemed like they were penalized for gaming the system.

Hope it was helpful :)